


...But Poison Awaits

by ftlow



Series: When Flowers Bloom... [3]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Soulmate AU, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, wound flowers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-13
Updated: 2021-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-21 13:41:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,570
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30022644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ftlow/pseuds/ftlow
Summary: Echo, before she was Echo, had a soulmate. But her flowers were poisonous.
Relationships: Echo/Ash (The 100)
Series: When Flowers Bloom... [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2063685
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6
Collections: Fandoms Challenge 2021





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Week 6 – write a ship with very few fics.  
> Well, I managed it - this fic is the very first for its ship, and I had to write Ash's character into the tags! I can't believe there haven't been tags for her before.  
> Anyone outside of the fandom can get a sense of the backstory I'm writing by looking up the Ash and Echo scene from The 100 episode Ashes to Ashes. The action within this fic is canon-compliant, it's just the soulmate parts that aren't!

Ash was lucky; she met her soulmate young. They were from the same clan, and their clan – and their queen – were particularly ruthless. Injuries were common, and so were their flowers. It didn’t take long to work it out.

Echo was patient with her. They spent their time running, laughing; they trained to get stronger together, but they also trained to spend time together. Ash was quick; she pushed Echo to run and jump and dodge faster, and for longer. When twigs pulled at Echo’s skin, carnations bloomed on Ash’s, and their matching reds bound them ever closer. Echo’s skill with a bow was almost supernatural, and Ash tried and tried to mimic her technique; she improved week by week and the bruise on her bow hand darkened; Echo’s own hand, despite no bruise of her own, bloomed with forget-me-nots.

They sparred, sometimes. Ash hated seeing the white lilies stark on her skin, marking the places where her headless spear had left welts on Echo, or where her dulled knife had left a shallow, painful graze. Echo hated hers more; she covered them, ashamed, and injured Ash as little as she could.

Sometimes, they’d forget to train at all, and they’d simply run through the forest until they flopped, and they’d talk and laugh until the sun started to set. Sometimes they would fight, but playfully, tackling one another and rolling over and over until they were an exhausted tangle of limbs and breathlessness.

It was times like these that Ash wondered whether they could run away. Leave Azgeda, and spend their lives together – without flowers, without injuries. Without training and spying and fighting.

Of course, they never got that far. They never got to be more than children together – and if she was honest with herself, this was what Ash had always feared. Echo never had the heart of a killer; but Ash was poison.

Ash knew what was going to happen when Echo loosed her arrow at the fleeing man, and she knew it would make no difference, for he would still die. She knew that Echo’s harsh whisper, telling her to fight, was a desperate plea – for Echo could not kill Ash. She would not lose her.

And Ash knew that her instinct to live was greater than her capacity to love, no matter what the flowers said. How else could she carry the white lilies, ashamed and yet accepting, while Echo did everything she could to avoid them? Ash was poison; Echo was innocence.

Ash felt her fingers close around the arrow shaft and knew it was fate. She knew what she had to do, and she did it mechanically, even as her eyes filled with tears and her heart twisted painfully. Echo – always the better fighter, always willing to believe the best of everyone – stared at her, eyes wide with shock and pain; the blood flowed over her bottom lip and dripped into Ash’s mouth. It tasted coppery – _poisonous._ Ash suddenly wished she’d had the chance to kiss her – just once, just to show her that she _had_ wanted their future.

“Congratulations, Echo,” Queen Nia’s voice said. And Ash knew that she would never be allowed to forget what she had done; she would forever bear the name of the soulmate she killed. Being a spy, an assassin, would be easy now. If she could kill Echo, if she could live as Echo, she could kill anyone. The poison would spread.

* * *

Later, when she finally allowed herself to look at her chest, she expected to find the monochrome rose, wilted, that graced so many chests in Azgeda. Instead, she found her rose entwined with a dead lily. It marked her as her soulmate’s killer; it added to her shame, and made her poison visible.

The bitter tang of blood – of her soulmate’s blood – never quite went away.


	2. Chapter 2

Echo learned to respond to her new name. The old Echo’s face stopped appearing in her mind every time someone called for her; ‘ash’ started to simply mean the remains of a fire.

She kept her tattoo covered, and her bare, flowerless skin exposed. She practiced with her bow until she was as good as her soulmate had been. She slipped seamlessly into Sangedakru and acted as Nia’s perfect spy.

She fought, and fought hard, for Azgeda and for Nia – and when the time came, for Roan. She fought for the bunker.

And she was cast out.

Finally, she stopped to let herself _feel._

Why was she fighting? Why was she trying so hard to survive, and have Azgeda survive, when Nia took away her soulmate – even worse, made her take away her own soulmate?

She was poison.

She screamed with frustration as the emotional toll of her life as a spy finally crashed around her. She bunched her hands into her hair and tugged, eyes wild, as she let herself remember Ash, and her soulmate Echo. She let herself grieve, and hate, and rage against who she had become and the things she had done to survive. The lives she had taken to keep her own.

Now the sky had fallen in, and people had fallen with it. Everything had turned on its head. And the world was going to burn.

She didn’t want to be there to see it.

* * *

She wondered what colour the flowers would have been on her soulmate’s skin where hers burned with the radiation. It was the first time she’d let herself think about her old soul marks for years.

She wondered where Echo would be, if she’d made it this far. In the bunker? Preparing for the stars?

_“I won’t go anywhere that there aren’t trees.”_

Ash gasped with the conviction and the clarity of Echo’s voice in her mind, as if she was standing right beside her. And of course it was true; Echo would have perished in Praimfaya, or before. She would never have pursued life trapped in a metal box, underground or suspended in thin air.

And of course, she was right. Echo’s – Ash’s – dead soulmate was right. What was she doing, wearing an orange space suit and preparing to watch the earth burn from high above it? What was she thinking? Her place was here, on the ground. She was a spy, a killer. She was poison. So many people were going to perish in this disaster – why should she, of all people, survive it?

She made up her mind and stepped out of the pod, walking quietly away while Emori and Harper continued to work on it. She crossed the room silently, tugging at her orange outfit more and more desperately.

There was one last way she could honour Echo. One final way she could stick to who she used to be.

* * *

The white paint was tucked inside her clothes, as always. She’d felt lost without it in the Mountain, for that was a prime example of when it might have been used. She had known, when she became a spy, that there was a chance – if she was compromised – that she would have to take steps to prevent the enemy interrogating her. The white paint was a denotation to Azgeda that she died willingly, in their honour.

She and Echo had talked about it, once. About the ability to choose your way out, and about the honour of giving everything for your clan.

Now, Echo pasted it onto her face not for Azgeda, but for her soulmate, and for Ash. For appropriate endings.

She cut her palms with her soulmate’s knife. She left the handprints on her torso, under her tattoo – a visual acknowledgement of the blood on her hands, the lives she had ended. Countless lives. _Poison._

She lined up the dagger that should have killed her, that day in the forest, with the spot below her sternum that Echo had pointed it at. The same point her own arrow had pierced.

It was a fitting way to die. It was a barbaric way to die. It was a brutal ritual.

And yet Bellamy wasn’t fazed. Raven wasn’t fazed.

Bellamy didn’t try to compliment her, or talk her out of her mindset. He didn’t tell her she was worth saving, for she never would have believed him. He told her that they had a better chance of survival if she was there too.

He said the same things Ash thought the day she pushed that arrow into Echo – she was poison, she was surviving.

He put his survival ahead of her worth. And it was exactly what she needed to hear.

Her soulmate was gone, but there were people still living. She was one of them, for better or for worse. She had done things she hated herself for – but they were done. Perhaps she could find a way to neutralise this poison within her – come up with an antidote.

_“No point in dwelling on the past. Learn from your mistakes and next time, fight harder and faster and stronger, and don’t forget what it taught you.”_ Young Echo’s voice echoed through her mind, memories of their sparring, and their practice with bows. The flowers that bloomed across their skin.

Bellamy had presented her with a challenge, an outstretched arm. The rose and the lily burned on her chest; the blood congealing below them pulled as she stretched out her arm.

This challenge… Echo would have welcomed it, grasped it firmly.

So she did.


End file.
